Reconstructing words using queries on subwords or factors

01/04/2023

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by   Gwenaël Richomme, et al.

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We study word reconstruction problems. Improving a previous result by P. Fleischmann, M. Lejeune, F. Manea, D. Nowotka and M. Rigo, we prove that, for any unknown word w of length n over an alphabet of cardinality k, w can be reconstructed from the number of occurrences as subwords (or scattered factors) of O(k^2√(nlog_2(n))) words. Two previous upper bounds obtained by S. S. Skiena and G. Sundaram are also slightly improved: one when considering information on the existence of subwords instead of on the numbers of their occurrences, and, the other when considering information on the existence of factors.